Toy Piano

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Kontakt Instrument

Aimed at those who seek to inject some spiky toy piano sounds into their compositions.

The timbre of the instrument can be best described as "thin" or "shrill" (as opposed to toy pianos with a more metallic resonance), but the instrument is tuned to work within the context of other instruments in order to provide less jarring clashes.

The piano has been recorded completely dry, so added ambiance and tonal shaping are under your control in post processing.

But why?

Connaisseurs know a toy piano is a wonderful instrument, especially a good Bontempi one which can easily equal a Steinway (on a smaller scale of course).

Toy pianos are however horribly crude to play! To add further insult to injury, while a Bontempi has a whopping 1.5 octave range, they don't actually have the black keys which basically implies you have no sharps and flats at your disposal.

Which is fine if your keys of choice are C major or A minor, but otherwise it's limiting.

Improving the Bontempi

Each key of the piano has been sampled at three different velocities to allow for expressing a dynamic range in your playing. All missing "black keys" have been added by interpolating the nearest available interval up or down a semitone in pitch.

This makes it possible to enjoy playing a Bontempi toy piano using your favourite MIDI controller (instead of having to go through the ordeal of endlessly re-recording your mic'ed toy piano in the hope of capturing a performance without any unwanted squeaking or rattling).

The additional scripting possibilities of the Kontakt sampler allow for other expressive articulations by adding key off rumbling sounds to the aftertouch response, which in turn will add a bit of charm by re-introducing some unpredictable handling noise whenever a key is released.

All samples have been recorded dry using a Shure SM57 microphone at 44.1 kHz and are untreated with regards to dynamic and spectral quality to allow for maximum post-production possibilities.